St. Augustine’s Seminary will remain under repair into the summer of 2014.
The work on the Scarborough landmark is no frivolous exercise in keeping it pretty.
“Not to alarm anyone, but stuff was starting to fall. The worry came that rather than just small pieces starting to fall there would be large pieces starting to crumble,” said architect Elie Newman of Joseph Bogdan Associates Inc.
The crumbling bits look a lot like limestone or marble. They are actually cast concrete, a product that was at the time marketed as “Roman stone.”
“It was a good product in terms of lasting 100 years,” consulting heritage architect Philip Goldsmith told The Catholic Register.
“But it’s an early example of trying to save a few bucks.”
The Roman stone did exactly what building contractors at the turn of the 20th century said it would do. It lasted 100 years. That means St. Michael’s Cathedral, Casa Loma and quite a few other 100-year-old Toronto buildings have a problem.
It will cost approximately $5 million to fix the Roman stone entablature that runs all the way around St. Augustine’s Seminary as well as replacing the copper dome that crowns the building.
On the inside, Roman stone is just ordinary concrete. The trick was adding an outer layer of hardened concrete that looks like stone. St. Augustine’s has both Roman stone and real limestone throughout the building.
“The real limestone is in pretty good shape,” reports Newman.
The Roman stone circling the top floor of the seminary isn’t just decorative. It’s actually holding up the roof.
For the restorers, that means finding a way to replace it without having to disassemble and replace the roof.
Goldsmith has come up with a procedure for cutting away the degraded outer half, reinforcing the structure and installing new cast concrete which will have the same appearance but slightly better staying power than the 1913 product.
It wouldn’t have been wise to delay the work, said Newman.
“When you could see it from four storeys down, you could imagine what was going on,” he said.
The architects found the situation no less dire on the big copper dome. At first glance it appeared a few of the screws holding down the panels might have let loose.
“Once we got up there we discovered it was really loose. It’s a good thing we’ve been addressing it,” Newman said.
It’s being replaced with the same sort of copper in use 100 years ago, but it will take a while before the new dome looks like the old dome.
“it’s going to take some time to reach the colour it was,” said Newman. “We’re using real copper. It will be very copperish, and then it will go brown, and then it will go green. These days it takes a lot longer to go greenish because our air is so much cleaner.”
To finish off, the architects will also restore several granite columns around the building.